Welcome to Rearview Mirror, a monthly movie column in which I re-view and then re-review a movie I have already seen under the new (and improved?) critical lens of 2022. I’m so happy you’re here.
In the Land Of Women will always have a special place in my memory not because of the movie itself, which is unremarkable, but because I so clearly remember the circumstances surrounding my seeing it. It was my freshman year of high school, and my best friend Laura (who had, and has, much more sophisticated taste than I do) and I saw it together at the AMC Van Ness 14, where I saw most movies between 1998 and 2010, and which has since closed and reopened as something else. Laura and I went unaccompanied; not exactly a rarity for two high school girls, but still a new enough experience to be notable.
Anyway, this was pre-Twilight, so the main draw was Adam Brody, whom Laura liked from The O.C. It seemed like the sort of adult, interesting, maybe even complicated movie that we should want to see as almost-adults who tried to be interesting and were maybe even complicated. I don’t remember whether we liked it or not, just that on the way out, we ran into the It Couple of our high school, who had spent the day doing that thing where you buy one ticket and when the movie ends you just go into another movie without paying. Very cool.
We then got a meal of some kind at Mel’s next door with a junior we knew and that was where we discussed a very important upcoming event: prom. At our tiny high school, prom was just the formal dance at the end of the year, and the whole student body could come. But I wanted a date. Specifically, I wanted a junior boy I knew from Model U.N. (yes, I was a dork, you should know that by now) to ask me, which he did, which is kind of another story, but the point is, the plan to get him to ask me was hatched after we saw this movie. And so it will forever remain a bolded footnote in the epic tale of my well-begotten youth.
There’s an allusion to pill-popping and Lucy is generically angsty (she paints!), but theirs is generally an OK family…except the dad is having an affair, and Sarah just found out she has breast cancer.
Anyway, the movie is fine. Brody plays Carter, a 26-year-old softcore porn writer who aspires to something greater. After being dumped by his movie-star girlfriend, he moves from LA to a Michigan ’burb to care for his ailing grandmother (Olympia Dukakis), which he does well even if he’s not very nice about it. His across-the-street neighbors (grandma’s front yard is overgrown; their front yard is immaculate!) take an immediate shine to him. We learn from Carter’s mother that girls have “always” cottoned to Carter, so he doesn’t think it’s weird when the unhappy housewife (Meg Ryan) befriends him, or even when she sets him up with her teenage daughter, Lucy (Kristen Stewart). There’s an allusion to pill-popping and Lucy is generically angsty (she paints!), but theirs is generally an OK family…except the dad (Clark Gregg) is having an affair, and Sarah (Ryan) just found out she has breast cancer.
They talk. A lot. All they do is talk in this movie. Sarah’s fallen out of love with her husband, and maybe was never that in love with him to begin with, and sees in Carter the kind of passion she missed out on in her youth. Lucy is having boy troubles, not eager to grow up too quickly but envious of Carter’s been-there-done-that confidence. He kisses both women and nothing more (the teen initiates; we are not to see Carter as a creep, though Sarah probably shouldn’t have put them together in the first place, even as friends).
Carter and Sarah’s flirtation is rather sweet, but of course they put the kiss with Stewart on the poster (a spoiler, BTW!). By the end, grandma is dead and mother and daughter have stopped fighting. Stewart even realizes the boy of her dreams has been right under her nose the whole time (and it’s Ted from Schitt’s Creek before he fixed his teeth)! Carter gets to work on his real screenplay and finds a new girl to project his fantasies onto (a diner waitress played by Ginnifer Goodwin—if you’ve gotta project your dream girl onto someone, she’s a pretty good choice!).
Listen, it’s fine. There are some genuinely funny moments. Brody has exactly one note to play, and he plays it well. I liked the moment when he realizes the guy who broke his mom’s heart in high school was an asshole. I like the fact that he simply refuses to get over his ex, because same. It’s predictable (Sarah says no one’s ever written her a love letter, so guess what our writer protagonist does?), but anodyne.
Listen, it’s fine. There are some genuinely funny moments. Brody has exactly one note to play, and he plays it well. It’s predictable, but anodyne.
I struggled to understand what it was about Brody that made him so irresistible to all women everywhere. He is, of course, charming and cute, but in his presence, female characters spontaneously propose marriage and divulge their traumas. After a party, Lucy tells him about an incident from when she was 11, when she and another child took their clothes off and fooled around, and it became a middle school scandal. In her recollection, it was traumatic, though not necessarily assaultive. To make her feel less aberrant, Carter tells her that stuff like that happens all the time and isn’t “that big of a deal.” Which may, in a way, be true, but it’s also absolutely the opposite of what you’re supposed to say when a teenage girl tells you about a difficult experience from her past that she’s kept locked inside her for years. And then she kisses him! This man who dismissed her feelings! Ah, but teenage girls are often foolish, this we know.
Yes, it’s an unremarkable but not unpleasant movie that made no impact at the box office or anywhere else. I’d be surprised if I’m not the person with the clearest memory of seeing it in theaters. But it does have one characteristic that makes it notable: it was written and directed by Jon Kasdan, son of Lawrence, brother of Jake. I feel for the guy. There are plenty of perks that come with being a Hollywood nepotism baby, but the comparison’s gotta sting. When your dad wrote 2/3 of the original Star Wars movies and directed The Big Chill, and your brother wrote and directed Walk Hard (a perfect film), it must be tough to have your heartfelt debut be…a middling dramedy. Sure, he rode his dad’s coattails into the Star Wars franchise, but I think we can all agree Solo is not a classic. Ah, whatever, he’s working on the new Indiana Jones movie (guess who wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark!), he’s gonna be fine.
We’re all gonna be fine. That’s the point of the movie!
Completely unrelated note: in one shot, Carter and Lucy and Lucy’s little sister are deciding what movie to see, and on the marquee are fake titles including “Age of Adeline,” which is very close to Age of Adaline, a real 2012 movie starring Blake Lively that isn’t based on anything, so that’s a very weird coincidence, unless there’s a behind the scenes connection that I’m not aware of, and if you figure it out, please DM me! FL
